Online Merchandising: How to Layout Your Products

Have you ever wondered why grocery stores place milk at the back of the store and chocolates near the checkout counter?

Simple: placing essentials at the back of the store encourages shoppers to walk around and browse other products. Placing small items (like chocolates) near the checkout counter encourages impulse purchases.

This is all a part of the science of store design. The right store layout can boost sales, improve loyalty and help customers find what they want faster.

Your online store isn’t any different. The organization and layout of your products have a big impact on what (and how) customers buy from you.

In this article, we’ll show you how to layout your products to maximize sales and conversions.

3 Things to Consider When Selecting a Product Layout

Product layout might sound like a straightforward problem when you first approach it. However, like most things in e-commerce, the complexities emerge once you dive into the details. There are three things you must consider when you choose a product layout:

1. Choice

Choice is a double-edged sword for e-commerce stores. The lack of choice means you limit opportunities. Too many choices, however, and you’ll leave visitors confused.

Effective product layout is essentially a process of balancing this duality. That is: giving the impression of plentiful choice, while still keeping the site easy to use and navigate.

Science says that decision making is mentally taxing. When you confront shoppers with too many choices, they are liable to not make a choice at all.

So how do you overcome this problem in your store layout?

One solution is to use featured images that lead to additional products. For example, notice how Made.com uses separate images for entire product categories (such as garden furniture):

Here are the instructions for Ecwid stores added on WordPress and Wix websites, too. On Ecwid Starter Site, the horizontal menu is only available.

2. Product information

Here’s another balancing act you should perform when selecting a store layout: showing product information.

You want to give customers the information they need to click through and make a purchase. At the same time, you don’t want to overwhelm them with too many details — at least not before they are on the actual product page.

Your mental model in this situation should be to ease decision making and pique customer interest. Ask yourself: what minimum information do my customers need to click through on a product?

You’ll find that this answer varies from store to store and product to product.

For example, notice how Amazon gives you just four information points on the category page: product name, price (including discount), rating and Prime availability:

Though this information is necessary for a large retailer like Amazon, for smaller businesses like Sand & Stone Jewelry, ratings aren’t as important. Hence, the category pages only show product name and price.

It’s easy to fall into the trap of giving away too little information in category pages. The best way to avoid this is to interview your customers and ask them what information they use to make purchase decisions.

3. Store design

How you’ve designed your store will have a big impact on your product layout.

An e-commerce store will typically have three key pages:

Homepage

Category and search pages

Individual product pages

What products you choose to showcase on each page-type will decide what products your customers end up buying.

For instance, note how Amazon promotes its own products on its homepage if you haven’t signed in:

It’s common for stores to promote latest offers on the homepage. Make sure to align these offers with your target audience. BestMadeCo, for instance, runs a Father’s Day promo keeping in mind its largely male clientele.

1. Push top products and offers above the fold

Given the kind of attention this space gets, it’s a good idea to place your top products above the fold. This can include:

Latest offers, sales and discounts

Best selling product or product categories

Recently launched products (works best at the start of a shopping season)

On Target.com, for instance, you’ll see the latest offers at the top of the page:

If you have a lot of offers, consider adding a slider, like this example from Walmart. Also note the promotions running below the navigation menu:

Some fashion retailers eschew conventional layouts in favor of promoting a brand image. On ASOS, for instance, you get a brand image with an option to Shop Men or Shop Women.

This tactic works when you’re trying to promote a brand vision with a lookbook. Most retailers, however, will do better with a conventional product-first above the fold layout.

Follow the same idea on category pages: push your best-selling and top-rated products above the fold. For example, check out Amazon’s category pages:

2. Mix horizontal and vertical layouts

There are essentially two ways you can layout your products on any page: horizontally or vertically.

A horizontal layout remains static. There’s a button at the edge of the page to scroll the listings further.

This example from Amazon illustrates things better:

In Ecwid, recently viewed products are also shown horizontally. You can choose the number of items to display them on top or at the bottom of your storefront.

Related products is another horizontally-oriented section. Products in this group are set up individually for every product page that allows to target your customers with highly relevant additions to their orders. You can display them on product pages and on the cart page.

In contrast, a vertical layout doesn’t have these scroll buttons. Instead, you see more and more products in a grid-like alignment as you scroll down. Like this:

Ideally, you should use a mix of both these layouts:

Horizontal layout when you want to show a few products from lots of categories, such as in Recently Viewed Products

Vertical layout when you want to show lots of products from the same category, such as one search and category pages

3. Follow convention and user expectations

There are situations when you’ll want to be unconventional with your design. The product layout isn’t one of them.

Your product layout is meant to orient users when they land on your site. A conventional layout ensures that they find what they want and don’t get disoriented.

Conventions, of course, vary from sector to sector. However, there are a few things you must consider:

Use a grid layout

In a grid layout, products are arranged in equally-sized rectangular boxes, like this:

This layout has long been the convention for e-commerce sites. Not only would your customers already be familiar with it, it is also good for displaying products. Further, it scales well — you can display just one box on small screens, or expand to several boxes on larger ones.

When using this layout, make sure to keep the boxes equally sized. As this case study shows, using equally sized boxes can increase revenue per visitor by as much as 17%.

If you sell with Ecwid, that is not a problem for you — Ecwid has an equally sized grid that automatically adapts to different screens.

Show navigation at the top of product listings

Another convention you should follow is to place your sorting options at the top of the page.

Customers have come to expect this placement and will naturally look here when they land on a category page.

Orient customers with breadcrumbs

Breadcrumbs are navigational elements that show users their path from the homepage, like this:

Adding them to the to top of the page helps orient visitors. It tells them what page or category they’re in and how they can go back to the homepage.

6. Experiment with mouseover details on category pages

One way to improve click-through rates is to offer additional details when a customer moves his mouse over a product image on category pages.

For example, this site shows product details and an add to cart button on mouse hover:

The purpose of this tactic is to give users key information at a glance. It works best when you expect users to browse through a large number of products quickly, such as in clothing stores. It might not work for other categories, but you can still run a few split tests and see the results.

When a customer clicks such a button, your store won’t open the whole product page. Instead, your customer will see a popup with product options:

If your product doesn’t have options, it’ll go straight to the cart.

Conclusion

When it comes to product layout, it’s best to stick to convention and follow what market leaders are already doing. Catalog your products in detail, categorize them thoroughly, then organize them out in a standard grid layout.

The best practices shared above will work for most stores across sectors. Try them at your own store and share the results with us below!

About The Author

Anna is a content creator at Ecwid. She loves big cities, pasta and Woody Allen's films.